The provocation this time was the fact that I pointed out Keith Olbermann’s fingerbang salute to Carrie Prejean. I actually took it pretty easy on KO, of whom I am a big fan. Unfortunately, some liberals require blind idolatry, even when it runs counter to actual liberalism.

I went on to critique the left’s treatment of Prejean, another big no-no in TBogg-land.

When we last saw Conservative Pet Liberal Tommy Christopher he was getting blog-killed by Big Bunny because he had the blogdacity* to go “shame shame” over Guy Cimbalo’s hatefuck article/post thingy. As it turned out, pretty much anyone who was familiar with Cimbalao’s article shared Tommy’s opinion, but the timing of AOL’s de-Tommyfying was enough to throw the wingnuts into a frenzy.

Well, they’re always in a frenzy, but it was kismet that day because the Mexicans, Muslims, and Negroes were behaving themselves. At least for for a few hours.

Now we see that Tommy has washed up on the shores of the Mediaite (I don’t know how to pronounce it either) blog which is kinda of like the crackbaby lovechild of Politico and Tiger Beat (”Who’s Hot Who’s Not!” “Win a Dream Date with Dreamylicious Jake Tapper!” etc.).

The “wingnuts” in a frenzy? Right, like The Huffington Post, or Howard Kurtz? He also displays the same class that led him to make fun of special needs children last time, tossing his barbs at crack babies here. Real nice.

He also posits that I only defend young, hot, conservative women. You know, like Kevin Jennings or Van Jones. Boing!

True, I was also fortunate enough to land a great gig with Mediaite that permits me to get out of my jammies and into the real world once in a while.

Factual lapses aside, he also goes on to miss the entire point of my post. By attacking Prejean’s tits and masturbatory habits, the left has amplified her importance well beyond what it should be, and made themselves look ugly in the process. Keith Olbermann’s (thankfully non-glistening) fingers may be worth a chuckle to some, but at what price? What average American is going to watch that and say “My, that Keith Olbermann is a clever fellow. Let me probe his views on marriage?”

TBogg says “As to his point that she has been amplified, her book sales (#846) at Amazon tell another story.” I say the problem was never that she was selling books.

Finally, before TBogg tries to accuse someone of being a “Conservative pet liberal,” maybe he should think about elevating his own editorial standards to at least equal Hannity’s. At least he admits he’s “mistaken” when somebody busts him.

This is a first draft of an article I posted at Mediaite. Here’s the final version.

As we reported yesterday, the eagle eyes of The Daily Show noticed that Sean Hannity substituted news footage from the 9/12 rally for last week’s much-lower-attended Super Bowl of Freedom. The effect was to make the latter event seem like a much bigger deal than it was.

Last night, Hannity apologized. Let’s see if his explanation washes, and try to figure out which is the legitimate news organization.

Here’s what Hannity had to say:

(video 1)

“And finally tonight, although it pains me to say this, Jon Stewart? Comedy Central? He was right. Now on his program last night, he mentioned that we had played some incorrect video on this program last week while talking about the Republican healthcare rally on Capitol Hill. He was correct, we screwed up, we aired some video of a rally in September, along with a video from the actual event. It was an inadvertant mistake, but a mistake nonetheless, so Mr. Stewart. you were right, we apologize. But by the way, I wanna thank you, and all your writers, for watching. (Laughter)”

Hannity says they “played some incorrect video,” but that’s not really accurate. The video they played was a pre-edited clip package. This wasn’t a case where the technical director hit a wrong button, this was edited together in advance. Someone had to seek out that older footage to add it in with the footage from that day. Who would do such a thing? Here’s the original segment. Pay close attention to the opening seconds:

The “opinion show” defense is only really operative when it comes to opinions. When it comes to news content on opinion shows, they retain some duty to present facts accurately and fairly. When I asked Fox to clarify those standards in the past, they refused.

But in this case, there was no-one from the newsroom to act as ombudsman for Hannity. His show’s producers edited Fox News footage together in a false way, and they played the package twice. It is legitimate, then, to ask whether the news desk is convinced by Hannity’s explanation. It is their credibility at stake.

The recent dustup over the Treasury Department’s attempt at excluding Fox News’s Major Garrett from a round-robin interview revealed apparent walls-within-walls within Fox’s news operation, too. Their original report, which stated that the Obama administration was behind an attempt to freeze Fox out of the interviews with Feinberg, contained no documentation or direct quotes from any of the principles. Why didn’t they interview Major Garrett for that spot? When Garrett finally did tell his story, only after Fox News had capitalized on the story, it turned out that Fox’s original report was incomplete and misleading.

This was underscored by the fact that Fox News’ Senior Vice President for News Michael Clemente had just spent the weekend filling in the gaps in that original report.

It would appear, then, that apart from their opinion arm, there are actually 3 distinct chambers of the Fox news operation: The news desk, the reporters, and the executives. It seems they would like us to judge the credibility of each separately.

We asked Fox News if their news operation satisfied with Hannity’s explanation of the misuse of their footage by an opinion show, if we could get an explanation from the video editor and/or the technical director explaining how this accident occurred, and if we could get Fox News Channel’s editorial standards with regard to presentation of news content during opinion programs. We await their response.